Disturbing article in the latest National Review about the appointment, as supreme court justice for Afghanistan, of a believer in sharia law who pronounces his intention to impose Islamic law including outlawing other faiths. I'm reading it, and it hits me: maybe I just don't understand Islam well enough, but to my ears, the whole sharia-courts phenomenon thoughout Islamist societies seems to be blasphemous and idolatrous by its very nature. Consider:

+The sharia courts purport to speak with the Voice of God, and to pronounce, not fallible human interpretations of God's will, but God's judgments themselves. Nor is this a carefully circumscribed authority, like the rare occasions when the Pope speaks ex cathedra; they do this stuff every day.

+More importantly, the sharia courts arrogate to themselves the sole and unchecked authority to carry out God's judgments. Death or multilation can be and often is the penalty if a sharia court judges that an individual has transgressed the court's view of God's laws.

+Individuals can be charged with, and beheaded for, blasphemy just for questioning the sharia court's authority.

Can somebody who knows more about Islam explain to me how this arrangement doesn't effectively set up the sharia court itself as the object of worship, obedience and devotion, under the harshest of penalties, and in substitution for the devotion of invidual conscience directly to divine authority?